


Less Than Kind

by Jenavira



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Movie(s), kinda Thor/Loki if you squint, mosty just Loki making Thor uncomfortable, no longer my own headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:04:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenavira/pseuds/Jenavira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Loki first turned on Asgard, Odin Allfather ordered the building of a cell, a chamber so laced with all the magic of the realm that even Loki Liesmith would not be able to escape it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Less Than Kind

When Loki first turned on Asgard, Odin Allfather ordered the building of a cell, a chamber so laced with all the magic of the realm that even Loki Liesmith would not be able to escape it.

Thor has never seen it, but he knows it is there. He pictures it in his mind as the Tesseract brings them both home, as they walk from the end of the shattered Bifrost through the city of Asgard, through the gates of the citadel of Odin and down, down, below the treasure chambers at the bowels of the palace, to the cell.

No one will look at Loki as Thor leads him down the Rainbow Bridge and into the city of Asgard to the citadel of Odin. They do not offer him even the dignity of their hate: he is nothing to them, he is less than nothing: outcast. Loki would say that he does not care, that he has always been nothing to them, but from the angle of his head and the cant of his walk, Thor knows otherwise. But neither will Loki speak to him when he tries, and so they pass through the halls in silence.

The cell is even smaller than he had pictured it. It is no closet, but it is a far cry from the spacious quarters Loki had occupied the last time he had been in Asgard. Its fourth wall, facing the corridor, is missing, replaced with delicate golden bars that shimmer with magic. They will not risk the prisoner out of their sight for a moment, it seems. Thor stares into the cell, trying to picture his extravagant brother living in this sparse, tiny room. It is difficult, even with Loki standing next to him. Loki cannot stand to be watched, Thor thinks, irrationally. When he turns, Loki is staring not into the cell, but at him.

The guards take Loki by the arms and move him backwards into the cell. He does not resist, and he does not take his eyes from Thor. One of the guards locks the cell, and a wall descends, sealing Loki's magic inside. Thor watches his brother, who watches him back, revealing nothing.

At last Thor leaves his brother to his new home. And that was the first day.

**

He tries to remember Loki attacking Earth, attacking Jane. He thinks of Barton's barely-restrained and fragile rage at his own imprisonment, of the look on the Captain's face when he saw the bodies and the wreckage of the city that was and had been his home. It is hard, here on Asgard, to remember Loki as anything but his beloved younger brother, full of tricks and cleverness and magic Thor could never hope to understand. The madman he had fought on Midgard seems another person entirely. 

It is not, in the end, that Thor decides to return to his brother's cell as much as his feet seemed to carry him there while he was not paying attention, much as he had always been drawn, as a child, to discover what amusing thing Loki was preoccupied with.

**

Loki is still muzzled. Indeed, he is still seated in the middle of his cell, watching the corridor. Thor's fists clench involuntarily. It is the right decision, he knows. Loki's magic is dangerous, but not nearly so dangerous as his voice. Master of Lies, Selvig had named him. It is no more than the truth. It enrages him nonetheless.

Loki's eyes over the muzzle never leave him, and they glitter with the laughter it suppresses. Thor has a vivid image of the grin his brother should be wearing. He leaves without saying a word.

**

On the third day Thor strides directly up to the bars of Loki's cage, grasping the immovable bars. Loki's eyes are still laughing. He is still wearing the muzzle. A million questions jostle in Thor's mind, but the one that comes out of his mouth is, "Why, brother?" Loki, of course, does not answer, but Thor cannot stop. "You are still of Odin's family. You are still my brother. I never cast you out." He will never forget the sight of his brother letting go, falling away from the shattered Bifrost and into the void. He would have given anything to have caught his brother's hand. "We would have taken you back." The laughter in Loki's eyes darkens. The cell, the bars, that muzzle, all give him the lie.

The hatred in Loki's eyes is easier to look at than the laughter. It turns Thor's stomach to know it. 

**

It is not many weeks before Loki's silence begins to grate. It is unnatural - Thor has never known his brother to be silent for long. And so, although he knows it is a mistake, one day he gathers his courage and enters Loki’s prison. There is some little sorcery to it, but Thor is prepared, has been prepared for this for some time, if he will admit it to himself. He loosens the catch and removes the muzzle from his brother’s face.

The device has left ridges across his brother’s face, his jaw, little pinprick lines around his lips. Loki gasps, coughs, spits blood onto the floor. Thor’s stomach roils as Loki looks up at him, no warmth or gratitude in his green eyes at all. What took you so long, he can hear his brother asking without words. How could you let him go, answers a voice in his mind that is part Sif, part Captain Rogers, part Clint Barton and his thirst for vengeance. 

Before Loki can put his new-freed silver tongue to use, Thor flees.

**

The next day he cannot bring himself to return. If any of his companions notice that he has, for the first time since their return, neglected to visit his brother, they do not mention it. It is this silence, as well as his own guilt, which drives him back. If no one will speak of Loki when Thor visits him every day, and if no one will speak of Loki when Thor visits him not at all, how long will it take for Thor to forget about Loki entirely?

His brother is standing with his back to the door when Thor returns at last, and his posture – regal and straight, hands clasped behind his back, gaze fixed into the distance – is so familiar that Thor’s heart leaps to see his brother returned to normal. But he cannot unsee the trembling in Loki’s clasped hands, nor the pallor of his skin. Thor has seen his brother live on nothing but magic for far longer than this, but he remembers what it did to him, and he does not relish watching it again. 

“Loki,” Thor calls out, but his brother makes no sign that he has heard him. “I have brought you something. Honey buns, from the kitchens,” he adds when Loki still does not turn to see. They had always been Loki’s favorite. Although no one else could eat them without making a ridiculous mess of themselves, Loki, fastidious as a cat, was unwilling to give them up and somehow always managed to make licking honey off his fingers seem perfectly within his dignity.

“I will leave them here for you,” Thor said. When there was still no response, he left the hall as slowly as he had come.

The next day, the buns were gone, the plate sticky with invisible drips of honey but not a crumb remaining. Thor replaced it silently with a plate of roast boar and hard Vanatheim cheese, smuggled from his own meal, and a jug of mead. These he placed just within the cell before stepping back, settling himself on the floor, and beginning a story of that morning’s court where Eldir and Byggvir had nearly come to blows over an accusation made by one of the serving girls. It was a humorous story, if more to Thor’s taste than to Loki’s, and Thor thought he told it passably well.

Loki did not speak to him that day, but Thor thought that the silence between them was a little less cold.

**

“And so the mighty prince of Asgard returns, once again, to survey the spoils of his victory: the caged and defeated monster.” Loki is leaning against the back wall of his cell, looking up at Thor from under his eyelashes, his dark hair half-obscuring his face. His voice is perfectly normal, as if this is not the first time he has spoken since his imprisonment. 

Despite the cruel words, Thor's heart leaps. He shakes his head. “Brother --”

“It is an interesting idea,” Loki continues as though he has not been interrupted, tilting his head back thoughtfully. The marks on his face have faded, but they are not gone. “You could build an exhibit of us, like the zoos of Midgard, so that all might come and marvel at the might of Thor.” Loki meets Thor's eyes then, and the bitterness in them drives all caution from Thor's mind. He opens the cell door – such a simple thing from here, so impossible from the other side – and steps up to Loki's side, curling one hand at the back of Loki's neck. He thinks better of it when his brother falls suddenly still, but it cannot be undone.

“You are not the spoils of war, brother,” he says.

Loki's face contorts with fury. “What am I, then?” he spits. “I am no son of Odin, no Prince of Asgard. You know what I am.” His eyes burn – not only with rage, but with a dark internal fire. They shade into red, and blue sweeps over his skin, tracing delicate Jötunn lines across his face. A wave of icy cold emanates from Loki's form and, despite himself, Thor drops his hand and takes a step back.

Loki's face hardens into a look of triumph that has none of the joy of victory well-won. Thor is lost. He remembers, with a painful clarity, the day years ago when Sif would neither speak to him nor meet his eyes. He no longer remembers what he had done to wound her, but he remembers going to his brother and begging him to help him make it right. And Loki had sighed, and rolled his eyes, and scolded his brother for his clumsy tongue, and told him what to say. 

There is no one to tell him how to make this right, now. Perhaps it cannot be made right, ever again.

**

When Thor returns the next day, it is for a moment as though nothing has changed, as though they are children again with none of this horror between them. Loki greets him smiling, and only the golden bars between them bear silent witness to all that has passed. 

Loki’s smile cracks when Thor names him brother.

“Surely we can dispense with that fiction by now,” he says, a touch of laughter in his voice, as though their kinship is another of his pranks, a joke he has played on Thor for too many years. 

For an instant, Thor feels the rage build inside of him, wants to seize Loki by the throat and shove him against the wall, tear these past months away by force and return everything to the way it once was. He holds himself back. Loki is not the only one who has changed.

“Now that we both know the truth,” Loki says, stepping closer, “we have no need of these lies.” Another step. Loki is close enough now to be uncomfortable, his breath ghosting across Thor’s cheek, but Thor has learned his lesson and he will not move away again.

“It is just as well that everyone does not know,” Loki says as calmly as if his mouth were not a breath away from Thor’s, and Thor does not question how he knows this. “Such speculation there would be, about what the crown prince was doing with his captured monster.” Loki smiles a poisonous smile, so close that Thor can almost feel its shape against his lips. “Is that why you keep returning, Thor? Will you come to see me in my captivity every day until you cease to think of me as your brother and you can take me to your bed like any captured slave?”

Thor jerks back, once again his determination shattered by Loki’s cruelty. Loki laughs, a bitter, broken sound. Thor shakes his head, refusing to let his own cowardice win out again, and takes Loki’s shoulders in his hands. Loki’s eyes widen, and his laughter stops.

“All I want from you,” Thor says, with all the sincerity that he can muster – and if lies have always been Loki’s weapon, sincerity has been his own – “is your happiness, and the end of this madness.”

Loki’s face closes again, returns to the perfect and impenetrable mask. “And yet you would keep me caged,” he says.

Thor shakes his head. He has no words to explain the necessity. He has not been able to explain it to himself for some time.

Loki steps away, and the distance of one pace between them feels like the void between worlds. “I would be alone,” he says, as if he has any right to command his own time, and Thor leaves him.

**

When Thor returns, Loki is gone. The door is locked, the golden bars unbent, the guards confused, and Loki is nowhere to be seen.

Thor finds, as he climbs the steps of the palace to bring his father the news, that he is not sorry.


End file.
